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AUK: Little dignity or safety in old age for many - Age UK last week published a damning report, which shows the depth of the crisis in social care and its consequent human cost. The report - 'Care in Crisis: Causes and Solutions' - provides the evidence to prove that care & support for older people in England has reached breaking point.

800,000 people who currently need care receive no formal support from either the state or private sector agencies. That figure may well rise to 1m people within 4 years as a result of estimated cuts to already threadbare social care budgets.

The report also shows that by 2014, England will be spending £250m less on older people’s care than a decade previously (in real terms). Even before the cuts began spending was only £40m higher than in 2004.

Yet at the same time the number of people aged over 85 who most often need care has risen by 630,000. The number of people receiving local authority funded care at home has been slashed from 489,000 in 2004/05, to 299,000 in 2009/10.

Socitm: Still striving for a brave new world of e-government - Socitm has published the full version of Planting the Flag: the Strategy for ICT-enabled local public services reform following launch of the summary version at the Socitm Spring Conference on 11 May 2011.

Planting the Flag is a Local CIO Council initiative led by Socitm's Futures group. It sets out how technology can enable public service reform across the whole range of local services and deliver significant savings & better outcomes for people where they live & work.

The full version of Planting the Flag is for CIOs, Heads of ICT, ICT specialists and private sector ICT suppliers to local public services:

* Section one of the document sets out 3 core principles for reform of local public services - collaborate, redesign and innovate

Publication of the full document marks the beginning of Planning the Route, the second phase in the development of the Strategy that will involve working with partners at the regional & sub-regional levels to develop more detailed plans to turn the vision into practical reality on the ground.

Newswire – Oxfam: If there isn’t enough food & water everything else is irrelevant - Oxfam has launched a global Grow campaign so everyone has enough to eat, warning that average prices of staple crops will more than doublein 20 years if urgent action is not taken to change the international food system, which is already failing to feed nearly a billion people a day.

New research published in Oxfam’s report, ‘Growing a Better Future’, forecasts that average international prices of key staples, such as maize, willincrease by between 120 - 180%by 2030, with up to half of this increase due to climate change. The world’s poorest people, who spend up to 80% of their income on food, will be hit hardest.

Every week in the Philippines, people pay more than four times the proportion of their income on food than we do in the UK. In India, people spend more than twice we do in the UK. As a proportion of their income, Indian people pay the equivalent of £10 for a litre of milk and £6 for a kilo of rice.

Ofsted: Too busy speaking to listen - Last week the Children’s Rights Director, Dr Roger Morgan, published the Messages for Munro report which finds that children in care feel social workers must do more to listen and consider their views. It sets out the evidence collated from consultations with 179 children & young people in care and care leavers which fed into the Munro Review of Child Protection.

Only 50% of children in care who responded felt their social worker or caseworker took notice of their wishes & feelings. And 53% thought their wishes & feelings did not usually or never made a difference to the care decisions made about them.
Yet the law states that children should be able to voice their views when major decisions are made about their lives and have them properly taken into account. As one child explains;‘I kind of wonder what happens when we tell them things’.

The Office of the Children’s Rights Director is also publishing a Young People’s Guide to the Munro Review report.

Forthcoming Event: The Future of Electronic Information and Records Management in the Public Sector -Workshops, Conference and FREE Exhibition 6th - 7th July 2011 - New technologies such as social networking and cloud computing are changing the way electronic content is created and managed and posing technical challenges for corporate information and records management. Cut backs in public sector budgets are causing information and records managers to rethink current practices and devise innovative solutions.

Cimtech’s 2011 conference run in partnership with the National Archives explores new approaches to information and records management, new standards and codes of practice, latest thinking on digital preservation and techniques for content classification and email management. We offer all-day workshops on SharePoint and Information Governance. We present several case studies from organisations implementing solutions and pushing the boundaries of IRM in the public sector.

With contributions from the TNA Chief Executive, Information Commissioner's Office and experts from central and local government, health and education, this year’s conference is a unique opportunity to update your knowledge and catch up with colleagues in the IRM field.